The present disclosure generally relates to depth camera architectures and more specifically relates to a range-gated depth camera assembly.
Virtual reality (VR) systems, which may include augmented reality (AR) systems, can leverage the capture of the environment surrounding a user in three dimensions (3D). However, traditional depth camera architectures are comparably large in size, heavy, and consume significant amounts of power. Moreover, different depth camera architectures (e.g., time-of-flight, structured light, and stereo vision) generally perform best in different operating environments, as they each have different strengths/weaknesses. Additionally, traditional depth camera architectures are not suited to expanded operational ranges (centimeters to multiple meters) found in VR system. For example, such expanded operational ranges may result in too much data for traditional depth camera architectures to efficiently process, and may possess dynamic ranges that are too large for traditional depth camera architectures to handle.